2008

After an intense 3 months, the 2007 annual fundraising campaign has come to a close. And what a close it has been — $601,976 raised! The amount, however, is not nearly as noteworthy as the global participation that occurred in order for this campaign to be successful. The map above, displayed on our home page throughout the campaign, shows the geographic distribution of contributors. This is truly a community supported organization. Thank you to everyone who helped us surpass our campaign goal and more importantly thank you for your commitment to keeping culture free.

“…the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.

Want to share it with a friend? Feel free. Email it to them, send them the link, whatever. If you find that you enjoy the book, I’m hoping you’ll order a copy, but that isn’t required. You could also post a review somewhere. Post a link in your blog. Ask your library to order a copy, so more people can get it for free. Whatever. If you do post a link somewhere, let me know about it. I’d love to see lots of people reading the book, the more the merrier.”

Sheehan-Miles is talking here about the idea that obscurity, not the sharing of cultural works, is the biggest threat to him as an author. Novels in particular are culturally ingrained in the concept of “sharing”, be it between friends, family members, or even libraries. By choosing a CC license, Sheehan-Miles is able to overcome the limitations of all rights reserved copyright in relation to this conundrum, allowing for the free redistribution and sharing of his novel online.

Please feel invited to join the Hong Kong team in discussing and reviewing their license draft and help the licenses to be adapted to Hong Kong law. The role of the discussion is to start the public debate and to make the least amount of changes necessary to bring the licenses into accord with Hong Kong law (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Worldwide_Overview). We expect the archived discussions to serve as a history of this experience. That way, your input will continue to be useful to anyone from any country even after the discussion for Hong Kong is completed.

We’re very pleased to announce that pledges have been made to fulfill the Hewlett Fundation’s “5×5″ funding challenge to Creative Commons. To read more about the incredibly generous support of the Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Creative Commons board, please see today’s press release.

Welcome to 2008, and let’s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it’s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs from the death of the author of a work until the end of the 50th, 70th, or some other year thereafter.

Read the whole post for some notable works falling into the public domain in some jurisdictions.

Everybody’s Libraries also has an informative post about Public Domain Day 2008.